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U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, leaves the U.S. Capitol after meeting with members of the U.S. Senate November 28, 2012 in Washington, DC. Rice has been meeting with members of Congress over the past two days to explain her position on remarks made regarding the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

If President Obama wished to treat U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s television blitz blaming the terrorist attack on our Benghazi consulate upon an anti-Muslim YouTube video as a coming out debut in advance of a Secretary of State appointment, as it turned out, that decision didn’t do her any favors. Some influential members of Congress believe that her false statements, adding to a poor career performance history, raise serious doubts about her trustworthiness in dealing with critical matters of state.

Commenting on “Fox and Friends”, Senator John McCain said: “Susan Rice should have known better and if she didn’t know better, she is not qualified. I will do everything in my power to block her from being the United States secretary of state.”

Senator Kelly Ayote (R-NH) told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer after she, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senator McCain met with Rice, pledged that she would also put a hold on Rice’s nomination if it came to the Senate, at least until all of the questions surrounding Benghazi had been answered. Senator Graham added that Rice is “disconnected to reality”, and is disqualified for a “promotion” to secretary of state.

Republican challenges to Rice’s eligibility for the promotion prompted Representative Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), the newly-elected chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, to charge those who question Rice’s qualifications to be named secretary of state are racist and sexist. Speaking at a news conference called by a dozen women House members, she said: “All the things they [Republicans] have disliked about things that have gone on in this administration, they have never called the male unqualified, not bright, not trustworthy. There is a clear sexism and racism that goes with these comments being made by Senator McCain and others.”

Yet if this truly is the case, that Republican tendency towards sexism and racism must represent a new shift. It wasn’t so many years ago that a Republican president named Bush selected a black woman, coincidentally one with an identical family name as Susan’s, for that very same position.

Actually, there are a number of reasons to challenge Rice’s selection for that office. I’ll summarize a few.

Benghazi Consulate Attack Cover-up Capers:

Just five days after the Benghazi consulate assault that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens , the White House dispatched Ambassador Rice to present the bogus talking points on five popular Sunday morning television shows. She told ABC News: “Let’s be clear, what happened this week in Benghazi was a direct result of a heinous and offensive video.” She told ABC that it was just a “small handful of heavily armed mobsters”, adding “We have decimated al-Quaida”. She also said that the current best assessment was that: “…it was a spontaneous…not a premeditated…response to what transpired in Cairo. In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier [on the 9/11 anniversary], there was a violent protest undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated.”

It is now clear that the intelligence community and White House knew from Day One that the attack was a carefully planned and heavily armed terrorist assault, and that even the September 10th Cairo protest on our embassy that she alluded to was over U.S. imprisonment of the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman who was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and provided the fatwa for the 9/11 attack in 2001…not about any video. President Mohamed Morsi, who replaced former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, had called for release of the Blind Sheikh in his inaugural address. News footage of the ensuing Cairo protests show banners honoring the Blind Sheikh in the background.

Did the ambassador know differently at the time? She should have, since she was privy to daily presidential security briefs and other classified information that is shared at the Cabinet level.

Representative Peter King (R-NY), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said that if Rice agreed to go on national television, she should have relied on more than unclassified talking points. As Ambassador to the U.N., she should have received a classified briefing: ”She left a clear impression that this was a spontaneous demonstration…And as President Obama said, don’t blame Susan Rice, because she had nothing to do with Benghazi. Then why do they send her out as representative to the American people?”

Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) has pointed out that Rice’s performance following the Benghazi attack, in many ways, echoes her actions and statements in connection with deadly 1998 attacks on two of our East African embassies when she was then assistant secretary of state for African affairs. At that time, similar to Benghazi, Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. ambassador for Kenya, had sent an emotional letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright begging for more embassy security in the face of mounting terrorist threats and a warning that she herself was the target of an assassination plot. Those letters were ignored.

Months later, on August 7, simultaneous car bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya killed 12 American diplomats and 200 Africans. Then, within 24 hours, Assistant Secretary Rice went on PBS as spokesperson for the Clinton administration, falsely claiming that we “maintain a high degree of security at all of our embassies at all times” and that we “had no telephone warning or call of any sort like that, that might have altered either embassy just prior to the blast.” Yet, just like Benghazi, there had been lots of prior warnings. A review showed that the CIA repeatedly told State Department officials in Washington and in the Kenya embassy that there was a terrorist cell in Kenya connected to Osama bin Laden who masterminded the attack.

Passing on Osama bin-Laden Handover Offers:

As a member of President Clinton’s National Security Council, Susan Rice reportedly played a primary role in forestalling an arrangement where Sudan could have turned over Osama bin Laden to the U.S. As Richard Miniter wrote in his book Losing bin Laden: “The FBI, in 1996 and 1997, had their efforts overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan…Rice [cited] the suffering of Christians [in Sudan] as one reason that she doubted the integrity of the Sudanese offers. But her analysis largely overlooked the view of U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney, who argued for calling Khartoum’s bluff.”

Ambassador Carney coauthored a 2002 Washington Post op-ed with Mansoor Ijaz detailing how Rice frustrated attempts to get bin Laden, as Sudan agreed to aid in rooting out terrorists: “By the end of summer 1997, [those officers] persuaded incoming Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to let at least some diplomatic staff return to Sudan to press for resolution of the civil war and pursue offers to cooperate on terrorism. Two individuals, however, disagreed, NSC terrorism specialist Richard Clarke, and NSC Africa specialist Susan Rice, who was about to become assistant secretary for African affairs.”